The Trials of Bradley Manning

7/28/2019 The Trials of Bradley Manning

1/19

The Trials of Bradley Manning

He was a tortured gay soldier who exposed the darkest

secrets of the U.S. military

and he has been paying theprice ever since

by: Janet Reitman

Bradley Manning is escorted away from a hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland.Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In June 2010, about two weeks into his military detention at Camp Arifjan,Kuwait, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army private accused of leakinghundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, was taken from theair-conditioned tent where he'd been living, barracks-style with a handful of otherinmates, and placed in a cage. No explanation was given; the reasons for thisabrupt transfer, which occurred several weeks before any official charges werefiled against him, still remain unclear. He would spend more than a month in thiscontraption; an eight-by-eight-foot cubenearly identical to those used at

Guantnamo

made of steel grid panels and equipped with a bunk, stainless-steelsink and an attached toilet. Human contact, other than with base psychiatrists andguards who would shake down his cell several times a day, was almost nil. On a"reverse sleep cycle," he was woken at 10 p.m. and sent to bed around one or twothe next afternoon.

Thus removed from the normal rhythms of the world, Manning, who'd alreadybeen in a fragile, emotional state before his arrest, very quickly and visibly beganto deteriorate. He was found one night "screaming, shaking, babbling, and bangingand bashing his head into the adjacent wall," according to official documents. He

had fashioned a noose out of bedsheets, "but it was pointless," he later said, notingthere was nowhere to hang it. By the second week of his confinement, Manninghad spent so much time in his cage that he had come to believe that he mightlanguish there forever. "My days were my nights and my nights were my days, andafter a while it all blended together and I was living inside my head," he said. "I

just remember thinking, 'I'm going to die. I'm stuck here in this animal cage, andI'm going to die.'"

And so began Manning's journey through the exceedingly murky realm of military

pretrial detention, a nearly three-year ordeal punctuated by months of legalizedtorture, not unlike what enemy detainees endured at Guantnamo Bay. Though not


2/19

the standard treatment for U.S. soldiers, even those accused of war crimes, Obamaadministration officials deemed it "appropriate" for Manning, who, in manyregards, "ceased to be a 'soldier' from the moment he crossed the line and revealedthe secrets of the war," observes Kristine Huskey, the director of the Anti-Torture

Program at Physicians for Human Rights. "In doing that, he became, in effect, the'enemy.' And once you're the enemy, you can be subject to treatment that is not forpeople on our side."

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

A former intelligence analyst, Manning was arrested on May 27th, 2010, at hisbase in eastern Iraq. Army investigators searched his computer, finding evidence ofthousands of State Department and military communiqus and encrypted chats

between Manning and an account associated with WikiLeaks founder Julian

Assange. Manning would ultimately be accused of the biggest leak of governmentsecrets in U.S. historya massive disclosure, hundreds of times larger than thePentagon Papers, composed of more than 700,000 U.S. intelligence documentsincluding: a July 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians,in which 18 people were killed; nearly 500,000 reports from the wars in Iraq andAfghanistan; more than a quarter of a million diplomatic cables from U.S.embassies around the world; and 779 documents pertaining to Guantnamo Bay.

Though none of the material was "top secret" (the Apache helicopter video, in fact,wasn't classified at all, nor were more than half of the cables), it was nonetheless a

damning and, at times, a highly embarrassing portrait of U.S. might anddiplomacy, exposing night raids gone terribly wrong; missile strikes mistakenlytargeting children; countless checkpoint shootings of Iraqi civilians; widespreadtorture conducted by the Iraqi forces with the tacit approval of U.S. troops bound

by an official yet previously undisclosed policy of noninterference; and rampantcorruption on the part of U.S. allies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and many MiddleEastern nations.

It was by any estimation a staggering breach, painting aportrait of a myopicmilitary culture that, as one former State Department official puts it, "was so intenton keeping the enemy out, I don't think anyone possibly imagined that someonewould do something from inside a base."

Matt Taibbi: WikiLeaks Was Just A Preview: We're Headed for an Even BiggerShowdown

It was also, as Manning told it, easy. "I listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in Americanhistory," he confided to Adrian Lamo, a hacker who Manning contacted and gave a

breathtakingly candid confession. "Pretty simple and unglamorous. No onesuspected a thing."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/did-the-mainstream-media-fail-bradley-manning-20130301http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/did-the-mainstream-media-fail-bradley-manning-20130301http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/did-the-mainstream-media-fail-bradley-manning-20130301


3/19

Manning now stands accused of 22 violations of military law, eight of whichfall under the Espionage Act, an arcane 1917 statute against sharing informationwith unauthorized sources that was previously used to indict spies like Aldrich

Ames, who pleaded guilty in 1994 of selling secrets to the Soviets. Using theEspionage Act to go after leakers has been a signature move of the Obamaadministration, part of what some view as a larger "war on whistle-blowers" thatsignifies a stunning reversal from the president's original stance of bringing greatertransparency to government. Since Obama first took office in 2009, hisadministration has brought six prosecutions for leaking national security secretsmore than all the past administrations combined. Of them, Bradley Manning is theonly member of the U.S. military and the only person to be placed in pretrialdetention. He is also the only person to be charged with "aiding the enemy" by, as

the charge sheet reads, "wrongfully and wantonly" causing U.S. intelligence to bepublished on the Internet, where enemies of the United States might see it.

At a pretrial hearing in December 2011, Maj. Ashden Fein, the government's leadprosecutor in the case, argued that because Manning had read Army reportsshowing that Al Qaeda and other enemies of the United States used WikiLeaks, hethus "knowingly," if indirectly, provided them with classified information.Whether Manning intended to help Al Qaeda or any other foe is, the governmentargues, immaterial. "If somebody stole a loaf of bread to feed her family, she stillstole the loaf," one of the government prosecutors, Capt. Angel Overgaard, said in

January.

In pursuing this line of prosecution, constitutional experts say the government istreading on dangerous ground. "Using the aiding-the-enemy charge in a typicalleak case without any evidence that the person had a real intent to give informationto the enemy is unprecedented," says Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU'sSpeech, Privacy and Technology Project. "Manning hasn't been accused of doingthis because he wanted to help Al Qaeda; they just say he put it out there, and anyreasonable person would assume that Al Qaeda would have access to it well,sure, and so would millions of other people."

From the moment he was arrested, Manning was denounced as a traitor. Fox News,unsurprisingly, described him as a "rogue GI." Mike Huckabee argued that"anything less than execution is too kind." The liberal establishment was equallydisdainful, ignoring the notion that Manning, a self-described "idealist," wasmotivated by conscience, seizing instead upon the fact that he had emotional

problems. He was "troubled," said The Washington Post; he had "delusions ofgrandeur," reported The New York Times. "He wasn't a soldier," a recruit who'd

been at basic training with Manning told The Guardian. "There wasn't anything

about him that was a soldier."


4/19

To be sure, Manning was an atypical soldier. Standing just five feet two, "tiny as achild," as one colleague described him, Manning was a relentless questioner. Hewore a custom dog tag identifying himself as a "humanist." He had a pinkcellphone. He was all but openly gay. Raised in Crescent, Oklahoma, a town with

"more pews than people," as he put it, he'd come out to his friends at 13, but sincejoining the Army in 2007 had lived under multiple layers of secrecy, thanks to themilitary's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Boot camp had been a misery. Bulliedrelentlessly, he suffered anxiety attacks, got into fights, even peed on himself(more than once). At Fort Drum, New York, where Manning was posted with the10th Mountain Division, he was unable to adapt to military discipline and wouldoften scream back at superiors. He "hated messing up," as one of his supervisorssaid, and was plagued by feelings of failure, taking any criticism as a personalslight. He flew into uncontrollable rages, yelling, crying and throwing chairs, then

became sullen and withdrawn. His behavior was so erratic, several of his superiors

suggested he not be deployed.

But the Army, stretched thin by two wars and in desperate need of qualified intelanalysts, ignored these recommendations. In the fall of 2009, Manning left for Iraqwith the 10th Mountain's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, a light-infantry unit he woulddescribe as "a bunch of hyper-masculine, trigger-happy, ignorant rednecks."Haunted by fears that he wasn't "masculine enough," as he told a friend, he beganto question his gender. On leave in the U.S. during the snowy winter of 2010, hespent a few days dressed as a woman. He called his female alter ego "Breanna."

Beyond these personal issues was the fact that Manning had begun to have seriousreservations. "Manning had a reason to believe the U.S. was engaged in activitiesthat violated a number of laws, and so he made a fateful decision to exposeillegality," says Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official whowas indicted under the Espionage Act in 2010 for leaking sensitive information tothe press. "That is the classic definition of a whistle-blower, and what hashappened to him since is classic retaliation against someone who exposed

pathological power run amok."

On a brisk day in late November 2012, Manning, accompanied by his lawyer,David Coombs, arrived at Fort George G. Meade, the stark, brick Army baseoutside Baltimore, to argue that his detention at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico,Virginia, where he was transferred after two months in Kuwait, amounted to illegal

pretrial punishment. A diverse crowd packed the tiny courtroom: a melange ofwhistle-blower advocates, attorneys, activiststhe latter group dressed in black T-shirts inscribed with the word TRUTH. And of the approximately 20 reporters inattendance, only a handful were from the mainstream U.S. media, which largely

ignored the proceedings.


5/19

Though WikiLeaks had made news all over the planet, Manning had remained anenigma, squirreled away in military detention while his case was all but subsumed

by the government's relentless pursuit of Assange. With Manning unable to speakfor himself, his story had been relegated to various friends, family, free-speech

advocates, human rights activists, lawyers, reporters and soldiers who'd servedwith him, all of whom contributed to the narrative that painted Manning as afragile, damaged, weak individualan emotional basket case who should neverhave been deployed to begin with, let alone given a top security clearance.

But the Manning who showed up at Fort Meade was not this soldier. Clad in hisnavy-blue dress uniform, with rimless glasses and short, neatly combed blond hair,Manning did not come off as "effeminate," as he had been so often portrayed. Hedidn't cry. He didn't even tremble a little bit not even when, on the first day of histestimony, his lawyer asked him to map out on the courtroom floor a diagram of

his cell at Quantico that, when he'd finished, was so tiny that Manning appearedalmost large standing in the middle of it. Not even when, on the second day, the

prosecutor held up the "noose" Manning had made of a pink bedsheet, and askedhim if he remembered it. During one poignant moment, Coombs handed Manninga cardboardlike "suicide smock," like the one he was given to wear in lieu ofclothes at Quantico, and asked him to put it on. A stiff blue contraption about 300sizes too big, it made Manning look like a turtle.

Most of all, Manning seemed very young a factor easily forgotten amid the largerconversations about government secrecy and WikiLeaks. He'd been just 21 years

old when he'd begun perusing classified databases and saw "incredible things,awful things . . . things that belonged in the public domain, and not on someserver stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C." They were internal memoslaying out the sordid details of the most blood-soaked and morally questionablewars since Vietnam, conflicts whose essential contours were something thatManning, who was 13 when the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan, and 15 when itinvaded Iraq, only vaguely understood.

Now he knew. And by every indication, he was horrified. "I want people to see the

truth regardless of who they are, because without information, you cannot makeinformed decisions as a public," he told Lamo. "I feel, for some bizarre reason, itmight actually change something. Or maybe I'm just young, naive and stupid."

It is sometimes difficult to recall, more than a year after the last troops departedMesopotamia, the huge political, moral and financial morass that was the Iraq War.Launched in 2003 with an optimistic in-and-out strategy, it was an endless,grinding conflict against a resilient insurgency that killed or maimed more than36,000 troops while costing taxpayers approximately $835 billion. By 2007, theyear Manning enlisted, the Army was a study in dysfunction. VA hospitals


6/19

overflowed with wounded soldiers. Countless more suffered from PTSD. Suicidessoared throughout the ranks. With recruitment steadily declining, the Armylowered its standards, accepting more kids with drug, alcohol and physical

problems. It recruited record numbers of non-high-school graduates, and even sunk

to doubling the "moral waivers" it granted to felons. In 2008, the cost of Iraq wasaveraging $11 billion per month with no end in sight. By 2009, the bloodshed wassuch that U.S. forces, under the counterinsurgency strategy of David Petraeus, hadturned to paying their former enemies not to attack them.

And yet while the war was a disaster, there was an unstated "prohibition againstexposing the myth," in the words of one former high-ranking military official. Thissilent edict wound its way from the Pentagon to Baghdad, where, over time, itwould make its way in the form of a cynical complacency to remote outposts likeForward Operating Base Hammer, where Bradley Manning began his tour in the

fall of 2009. By then, recalls Peter Van Buren, a former State Department officialwho was posted in Iraq, much of what the U.S. was doing had become blatantlytransparent. "We'd been at it for years and didn't have much to show for it," hesays. "The Iraqis knew that too. They'd learned very quickly that our expectationswere very low, and so they played along with the charade. Everyone was winkingacross the table at one another."

Manning, arguably, wasn't in on the joke. The son of a former Naval-intelligenceoperator, he had an almost naive belief in American power; he'd wanted to be asoldier since the third grade. A natural with computers, which he'd learned to

program when he was eight, he also believed he might be good at the Army

atleast the part that didn't require shooting anyone. "I'm more concerned aboutmaking sure that everyone soldiers, Marines, contractors, even the local nationalsget home to their families," he once told a friend. "I feel a great responsibilityand duty to people."

A science geek, Manning dreamed of studying physics at Cornell or MIT. But priorto enlisting, he'd spent a few years adrift, working odd jobs, moving fromOklahoma City to Tulsa to Chicago and finally to Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of

Washington, D.C, where he worked at Starbucks and spent much of his free timeplaying an extraordinary amount ofEve Online, the multiplayer sci-fi role-playinggame. The Army offered Manning a new life and a way to pay for college, and asdraining as it was on him personally, he was, by every account, excellent at his job.A "35 Fox," the Army's code for an intelligence analyst, Manning scrutinized dataacross a broad spectrum of sources and prepared intelligence briefings for hissuperiors. A voracious reader, he spent his free time poring over books on physics,

biology, international relations, even art history, all of which he believed couldinform his analysis and "hopefully," he told a friend, "save lives."

FOB Hammer was a middle-of-nowhere base, situated in eastern Iraq, about a thirdof the way between Baghdad and the Iranian border. Nine miles square, it had been


7/19

built for the surge and was fortified by layers upon layers of blast walls andconcertina wire to fend off attack. When it rained, the ground turned to peanut

butter. When it was dry, soldiers lived in mountains of dust. No matter where youlooked, the vista was the same: empty.

Life on the FOB was in some ways a portrait of end-of-the-war ennui. Only afraction of the 300-odd soldiers at Hammer engaged directly with Iraqis; the rest,like Bradley Manning, never left the base. His world was smaller than a footballfield, consisting of his double-occupancy trailer, the base chow hall, recreationcenter and shower trailer and, just a few steps away, his workstation in theSensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. In this windowless

plywood box of a building, intelligence analysts led a Groundhog Day-likeexistence working 12-hour shifts, after which they'd eat, sleep, wake up and do itall over again. It was tedious, often boring work, and security was remarkably lax.

"Everyone just sat at their workstationswatching music videos, car chases,buildings exploding," he later said.

But their access was tremendous: Even low-level analysts could connect toSIPRNetthe Secure Internet Protocol Router used by both the State Departmentand the Department of Defense to transfer classified dataas well as to anothernetwork used by the Justice Department and the Department of HomelandSecurity. The networks were monitored but mostly for outside intrusion. Manningonce asked an NSA official if the agency could find any suspicious activity comingout of the local networks. "He shrugged," Manning recalled, "and said, 'It's not a

priority.'"

Manning started off on the night shift, as part of the Shi'a Threat Team, a group ofanalysts tasked with tracking insurgent supporters of radical Shiites like Muqtadaal-Sadr. He did well, earning commendations for his "persistence," and in

November 2009 was promoted to specialist. Not long afterward, word began tospread around the FOB that Al Qaeda was publishing "anti-Iraqi literature" at alocal printing facility. With help from American troops, the Iraqi federal policeraided the place and arrested a group of 15 men they claimed to be insurgents.

But almost immediately after the raid, it became clear to U.S. forces that the menwere not Al Qaeda, but political opponents of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,whom the government wanted to silence. It was an embarrassing moment for the10th Mountain, whose officers "simply wanted it to go away," as one governmentofficial who was there recalls. "Had we done our research, we would have realizedthat Maliki was a thug who was using us to do his dirty work." For some of thesoldiers, particularly those who truly believed they were nation-building, it was adevastating blow. "This was their first encounter with the gap between propagandaand reality," the official adds. "We weren't promoting democracy at all. In fact, this

whole democracy thing was bullshit."


8/19

Manning was one of the first soldiers to learn of the fiasco, having been ordered toinvestigate the "bad guys" after the raid. "It turned out they had printed a benign

political critique titled 'Where Did the Money Go?' following a corruption trialwithin the prime minister's cabinet," he said. Shocked, Manning "immediately took

that information and ran to the officer [in charge] to explain what was going on."The officer told him to "shut up," he said. "He didn't want to hear any of it."

Manning knew the 15 Iraqis were doomed. The Iraqi police were known to torturetheir prisoners, while the U.S. military looked the other way. Manning couldn't."That was a point where I was actively involved in something that I wascompletely against," he said. "And completely helpless." From then on,"everything started slipping. I saw things differently."

According to the government's charges, Manning made his first contact with

WikiLeaks in November 2009, either just before or not long after the detaineeincident. He would ultimately say he made direct contact with the "crazy white-haired Aussie" otherwise known as Julian Assange, though whether he spokedirectly to Assange is unknown. "I've talked to Julian many times, but I've alsotalked to other guys too who were also 'Julian,'" says one hacker who's workedwith WikiLeaks. "You can never be sure who is who."

Among the first things Manning leaked was a 17-minute video, which was titled"Collateral Murder." The video, taken in 2007, depicts Apache helicopters firingon unarmed civilians who appear to be mingling with insurgents in the street. The

wounded crawl away and are shot dead. A van appears to retrieve the bodies; thereare kids inside. They are shot, too. The crew banters back and forth as if they're

playing Call of Duty. "Look at those dead bastards," one says. "Well," remarksanother, "it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle."

Manning had watched the video in the SCIF these kinds of films played routinelyand were watched by dozens of people. "At first glance, it was just a bunch of guysgetting shot up by a helicopter. . . . No big deal," he said. "But something struckme as odd with the van thing. And also the fact that it was being stored in a JAGofficer's directory." So Manning dug deeper, eventually tracking down the date ofthe incident and the GPS coordinates, and coming up with a story from The NewYork Times discussing the death of two Iraqi journalists among 16 killed in a clashwith "Shiite militias." "It was unreal," Manning said. "It humanized the wholething. I just couldn't let these things stay inside my head."

"Collateral Murder" was released on April 5th, 2010, at a WikiLeaks pressconference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Within days, it hadgone virala graphic snapshot of 21st-century soldiering run amokand was heldup by media organizations worldwide as documentation of a war crime.


9/19

Manning, meanwhile, had the surreal experience of watching the reaction to hisleak from the confines of his base. He was amazed when several of the perpetratorsof the attack issued mea culpas, and he friended a few on Facebook without themhaving any idea who he was. But the crushing routine of the FOB, made worse by

his isolation and gender-identity crisis, weighed on Manning. Between December2009 and May 2010, the period Manning was allegedly in contact with WikiLeaks,superiors noticed a drop-off in both his performance and his mental state,culminating with an incident on May 7th, 2010, when he was found curled up onthe floor of the SCIF in a fetal position, having carved the words I WANT into achair. A few hours later, Manning punched a superior in the face. "I'm tired ofthis!" he said, as his target, Spc. Jihrleah Showman, pinned him to the ground.

The following day, Manning was demoted back to private first class, removedfrom his job as an analyst and assigned to the supply room as a clerk. Already

miserable, he was now as marginalized as he'd ever been. For Manning, it seemedas if the "only safe place," as he put it, was the Internet.

One lonely night, looking for connection and having reached out to strangersonline before, he e-mailed a 29-year-old security consultant named Adrian Lamo.A once-handsome Colombian-American with a prescription-drug habit, Lamo had

become famous in the early 2000s as the "homeless hacker," a digital savant who,having dropped out of high school in San Francisco, traveled the country on aGreyhound, sleeping on friends' couches or in abandoned buildings, downinghandfuls of amphetamines and using his battered Toshiba laptop to troll through

the databases of corporate behemoths like Yahoo, AOL and MCI WorldCom

after which he'd helpfully explain to the companies' system administrators how to

plug the holes he'd found.

Lamo's career as a "security do-gooder" ended abruptly in 2002, after he, then 21,hacked The New York Times and notified the company to point out its securityflaws. The Times was not amused. In 2004, after a lengthy FBI investigation, Lamo

pleaded guilty to computer crimes, for which he was given a sentence of sixmonths under house arrest.

Other hackers regarded Lamo with a mix of curiosity and distrust. "No one canreally pinpoint anything particular that he'd done, at least since he'd stoppedactively hacking," says Griffin Boyce, a Web developer who knows Lamo. "Hetook otherwise-secret activities and was fairly open about them; that made peoplenervous. It's incredibly foolish to speak to the media about doing somethingillegal." Within many circles, the consensus was that Lamo, desperate forrecognition, might do virtually anything for publicity.

But Bradley Manning knew none of this. All he knew was that Lamo, who was

openly bisexual, had starred in a 2003 documentary,Hackers Wanted, whichfocused on Lamo's travails with law enforcement; he also knew, from Lamo's


10/19

tweets, that he supported WikiLeaks.Hackers Wantedhad never been released, butin May 2010 it leaked online. Shortly afterward, Lamo received a message from astranger.

"Hi," wrote aperson named "bradass87." "How are you? I'm an Army intelligenceanalyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'.. . I'm sure you're pretty busy . . .[but] if you had unprecedented access toclassified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8-plus months, what wouldyou do?"

Lamo notified the authorities, and over the course of the next several days, hesurreptitiously logged their chats. Manning, believing he was speakingconfidentially, let loose. He explained the WikiLeaks submission process and saidhe'd talked with Assange numerous times. He went into depth about lack of

security at his FOB and how easy it was to steal information. "The culture bredopportunities," he said. He referred to himself as a "mess," and spoke of hisdisillusionment"I don't believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore only [in]a plethora of states acting in self interest." He often seemed like he was having anervous breakdown.

Lamo would later say that he was afraid Manning's leaking could put Americanlives at risk. "Brad was detailing his last-ditch vision of an effort to save the worldfrom itself," Lamo says. "I was seeing my own worst-case scenario of long ago

play out: the arbitrary scattering of data that was at best hopelessly subjective and

at worst prone to misuse. Truth is an elusive, personal thing," he adds. "Bradconfused facts with truth. You can't convince people of a truth they don't want tosee."

On May 25th, Lamo met with government agents at a Starbucks near his house inCarmichael, California, and handed over the logs of his chats, providinginvestigators with the crux of their evidence against Manning. Two days later, aweek after initiating contact with Lamo, Manning was stopped by Army CIDagents while at work in the supply room at FOB Hammer, escorted into aconference room and handed a piece of paper explaining his legal rights. After a

brief hearing before an Army magistrate in Baghdad, he was remanded into thecustody of the United States military, pending trial. The agony of Manning's Armycareer was at an end. But the real torture was yet to come.

On July 25th, 2010, two months after he was arrested, the extent of Manning'sambitions to expose the dark side of American wartime conduct became apparentwhen WikiLeaks published the "Afghan War Diary." Manning described the six-year archive of secret military communiqus as "one of the most significantdocuments of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of


11/19

21st-century asymmetric warfare." The New York Times broke the story thefollowing day in a front-page article depicting the logs as presenting a bleak

portrait of the Afghan war, "in many respects more grim than the officialportrayal." Five days later, Manning was removed from his cage at Camp Arifjan

and put on a commercial charter bound for the United States. Now the highest-value U.S. military detainee in recent history, he was incarcerated at the MarineCorps brig in Quantico, Virginia, where he would pay for his sins.

For decades, soldiers awaiting court-martial had been detained in Quantico brig, alow-slung brick building situated among the elms on one of the country's mostillustrious Marine outposts. The Baltimore Sun once referred to it as "the world'smost well-behaved prison." But its resources had been halved by recentdownsizing, leaving it unable to adequately support long-term detainees, let alonesomeone of Manning's stature. There were no permanent mental-health counselors

or treatment programs: Those in need of psychiatric care were left to see the basepsychiatrist, whose duties spread across a 58,000-acre campus.

Manning's incarceration came in the wake of years of scandal over military-detention policy. Nearly 200 detainees have died in U.S. military custody duringthe War on Terror, among them, seven alleged "suicides" at Guantnamo Bay andtwo other mysterious deaths at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that were later

proved to be murders. Though harsh interrogation practices stopped under Obama,curbing suicidebe it of foreign detainees or of U.S. service memberswas nowone of the military's top priorities.

Making sure that nothing happened to Bradley Manning would become a fixationfor Quantico officials, notably Lt. Gen. George J. Flynn, who commanded alloperations on the base from his office at the Pentagon. In the spring of 2010, a

Navy captain named Michael Webb had killed himself while detained at the brig.Flynn urged his staff to make sure this didn't happen again. "It would be good ifyou impressed upon all who come in contact with Pvt. Manning the absolutenecessity of keeping a close watch on him," he wrote to base officials. "His life hascompletely fallen apart, which makes him a strong candidate (from my

perspective) to take his life."

It was into this hypervigilant environment that Manning arrived on the warm nightof July 29th, 2010, exhausted, having traveled nearly 24 hours from Kuwait viaManheim, Germany. Fearing he'd be sent to Guantnamo, he was initially "elated,"he said, to be in the United States, in a "brick-and-mortar building with airconditioning, hard floors and running water." This changed when Manning wastaken into a darkened room, where several Marines began a verbal onslaught hecalled a "shark attack."

"Face the bulkhead!" Manning had no idea what a bulkhead was. Marine termswere different from Army terms, as was also true with rank. A private first class,


12/19

Manning was now a lance corporal to the Marines. To not know these distinctionswas cause for "correction," which meant more attacks. After this harshindoctrination, Manning could barely think. "Basically, everything I did waswrong," he said.

One of the questions Manning was asked was whether he wanted to commitsuicide. It was a fair question: Manning had been put on suicide watch in Kuwait,after making two nooses in his cell. But after talking to a psychiatrist, who put himon anti-anxiety medication, he'd stabilized. Now he felt fine, he told the guards,who didn't seem to believe him. They pressed him about what happened in Kuwaitagain and again:If you're fine, then why were you on suicide watch?

Finally, after repeatedly trying to answer the questions to their satisfaction,Manning picked up a pen and, with the Marines standing over him demanding he

answer conclusively whether he was suicidal, wrote the phrase: "Always planning,never acting." It was sarcastic, he later explained, and maybe a little clueless. Itwould also define his fate.

The military does not use the term solitary confinement, preferring"administrative segregation" to describe the form of isolation that Manning,

because he was deemed a suicide risk, endured. At Quantico, he was installed in asix-by-eight cell with no window or natural light and spent no less than 23 hours

per day in an area the size of an exceedingly small closet. Although regulationsstate that any discipline administered must be "on a corrective rather than apunitive basis," he spent his waking hours, from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m., forced to siton the edge of his bed, back straight, in what, after many hours, could be seen as astress position. He was not allowed to lie down or lean his back against the wall.His glasses, without which he couldn't see, were taken away, leaving him to spendthe first few days in a fuzzy oblivion. The brig ultimately returned his glasses, butthey were his only accessory: Manning was not allowed toiletries or any other

possessions; even pen and paper were only given to him one hour per day to writeletters. Though he could read, he was allowed only one book or magazine at a time

but never a newspaper

and if he put the book down to rest his eyes, or was

spotted not "actively reading," it was taken away.

There were several guards charged with what they called "Manning Watch" andwhose instructions were to check on Manning every five minutes, 24 hours a day.Constant observation and frequent interruption were well-worn tactics widely usedon detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at Guantnamo. "It's sleepdeprivation, basically," says Brandon Neely, a former Army MP who was posted atGuantnamo. It was also broadly acknowledged, and condemned, by human rightsmonitors, as a form of punishment.


13/19

At Quantico, these abuses were considered part of "suicide prevention." To ensurehe didn't harm himself, Manning had neither sheets, nor a pillow, and had torelinquish his clothes at night. He was required to sleep on his back, with his headfacing the observation booth, directly in the path of a florescent light if he rolled

over, or tried to sleep on his side, a guard would correct him. His arms had toremain above the tear-proof "suicide blanket" he was given, which felt likesandpaper. If his arms inadvertently crept under his blanket when he was asleep,the guards would wake him. Once, trying to untangle himself, he got stuck in theoversize-yet-unwieldy suicide smock and needed assistance to get out of it.

For the first five months of his confinement at Quantico, Manning was allowed just20 minutes a day of "sunshine call," during which he was taken from his cell in fullrestraints and led either to an exercise yard or a small rec room. There, held up byguards to prevent Manning, who weighs just 105 pounds, from toppling over, he'd

walk, very slowly, in a figure-eight pattern. When he was done, he'd be returned tohis cell to sit in isolation, for there were never any inmates housed nearby ostensibly out of concern, one brig official later testified, for other detainees' senseof patriotism.

Soon after arriving at Quantico, Manning began meeting with Dr. WilliamHocter, the base psychiatrist, who recommended he be taken off suicide watchafter a week. Navy regulations specifically state that once a psychiatrist deems a

prisoner to no longer be at risk, he or she shall be removed from suicide watch. AtQuantico, however, the officer in charge of the brig, Chief Warrant Officer JamesAverhart, chose to ignore this directive, later explaining that, in his view, the word"shall" did not mean "right now," but rather "when I'm satisfied." Averhart waitednearly a week to abide by Hocter's recommendation. That August, he tookManning off suicide watch and placed him in "prevention of injury" watch, a statusthat may be arbitrarily imposed by brig officials without a psychiatrist's agreement.Despite his psychiatrist's continued recommendation that he be taken off, Manningremained on POI for the next nine months.

Manning's downgrading to a POI

or suicide-risk-lite status

gave him a fewmore privileges. Now, instead of a suicide smock, he had shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops to wear during the day (though he still had to relinquish all but his underwearat night). Otherwise, his treatment was much the same: Meals were in his cell, on a

plastic tray, with a metal spoon. Exercise in his cell, even sit-ups or push-ups, wasforbidden, in the fear that he would injure himself. When he showered, a guardstood outside "with a line of sight on me," he said. When using the toilet, in fullview of the guards, he had to request his toilet paper in formal Marine fashion:"Lance Corporal Bradley Manning requests toilet paper!"


14/19

Hocter was appalled. In his 20-year career treating patients at military and civilianprisons, including Guantnamo, the Navy captain had never seen any detainee heldwith such unremitting security as Manning, nor had his recommendations ever

been so consistently disregarded. "It wasn't good for Manning, and it just wasn't

clinically appropriate," he testified. "If they had a specific reason [why] he had tobe watched that closely, it wasn't known to me, and it wasn't psychiatric."

Hocter sought a second opinion in Dr. Ricky Malone, a prominent forensicpsychiatrist from Walter Reed, who concurred with his conclusions. "I didn't thinkManning needed suicide precautions. . . . I saw no reason for safety precautions,"he later said. In fact, he added, "If I was treating him in my clinic, I'd only beseeing him one or two times a month." Brig officials thanked the psychiatrists fortheir "input" and did no more.

If Manning had been a tough fit for the Army, the Marines regarded him as if hewere from another planet. Half the size of most MPs, with thick, military-issueglasses that almost swallowed his face, he was an utterly unfathomable nerd who

pored overScientific American and kept a stack of books in an adjacent cell,among them George W. Bush's memoir,Decision Points, Howard Zinn'sA

People's History of the United States, Carl von Clausewitz's On Warand twoworks by Emmanuel Kant. He rarely spoke, but when he did, he launched intosoliloquies about evolution and man's use of the brain. He made faces in themirror. He plucked his eyebrows with his glasses. He played peekaboo.Sometimes, he'd wage what looked like imaginary sword fights with imaginary

characters or lift imaginary weights. Sitting on his bed, cross-legged, he'd contorthis legs into what the guards seemed to think were uncomfortable, even dangerous,

positions that were actually yoga poses. At other times, he danced around his cellas if he were at a rave. Once, to the guards' horror, he even licked the bars of hiscell door.

"Dancing is not technically exercise as far as they were concerned," Manning saidin court. "Since it wasn't unauthorized, I figured I could do it." His imaginaryweight lifting was, he explained, resistance training. Sword fighting was an escape.

"I tried to do anything to stay awake," he said. Making faces in the mirror was aregular part of his day. "It was sheer, complete, out-of-my-mind boredom. Themost entertaining thing in there was the mirror," he said. "At least you can interactwith yourself."

But the MPs, notably Manning's official minder, Master Sgt. Craig Blenis, didn'tget that. Manning was too quiet a sign to Blenis that he might be plottingsomething. Then there was the issue of his gender. Blenis had intercepted a letterManning had written in which he'd signed his name "Breanna Elizabeth." That, inBlenis' view, was clearly "not normal."


15/19

Stuck in this Kafka-esque labyrinth of psychiatrists who said Manning wasn'tsuicidal, MPs who insisted he was, and commanders whose only interest, as onesenior base official, Col. Robert Oltman, admitted during a heated argument withHocter, was that Manning not die "on my watch," Manning appealed directly to the

classification-and-assessment board to reconsider his status. He was given ahearing, during which Manning's intake statement, "always planning, neveracting," was the focal point. Manning tried to explain that he'd felt pressured by theMarines who were standing over him at the time.

"So you just lied?" The guards were incredulous. Manning stammered that hedidn't know if it was a false statement. "I was told to put something down, and I

put something down without thinking about it."

"If we can't trust you [were] telling the truth at that time, how can we trust that you

are telling the truth now?" one Marine said. "How can we believe what you say,ever?"

By the extreme standards set by the War on Terror, Bradley Manning was nottechnically "tortured." His treatmentisolation, suicide watch, minimal exercisewas arguably, and unfortunately, not much different from what many prisonersendure throughout the American penal system, including those in pretrialdetention. One editorial in theNew York Daily News made note of this fact

"Hardly waterboarding," the paper said. "Hardly electrodes on the genitals. Hardlybeatings. Hardly burns."

The real measure of torture, however, is far more nuanced. Manning was, if notofficially, then effectively, in solitary confinement, which is perhaps the mostdevastating form of torture: designed to break the spirit and punish. By the winterof his incarceration, the lack of sunlight and clothing and ability to lie down or lean

back like a normal human beingnot to mention the daily humiliation of having toask permission, in a sense, to publicly go to the bathroomhad taken its toll. Hisworld was his cell. Gradually, Manning began to feel as if he were mentally

slipping backward into "that lonely, dark, black hole of a place" he'd been at inKuwait.

Seven months into his isolation, Manning told Master Sgt. Brian Papakie, thesecond in command of the brig, "I don't understand. I'm not doing anything to harmmyself." And yet his appeals had gone nowhere. He ran down a list of ways hecould hurt himself if he really wanted to: throwing himself against the wall,drowning his head in the toilet, jumping up and down until he had a heart attack.He'd done none of these. "If I really wanted to hurt myself, I could use myunderwear or flip-flops."


16/19

To Manning, the comment was a moment of frustrated sarcasm. But to the Marineswho ran the brig, it was a threat. That night, Manning was told to give up hisunderwear and flip-flops, as well as the rest of his clothes. He spent the night underhis suicide blanket, naked.

Manning woke before reveille to find that his clothes, which were usuallydelivered to him on his feed tray, weren't there. He usually stood for the morningcount in his boxers and shower shoes, a blanket wrapped around him. Thismorning, as even his underwear was missing, he'd have to stand without anyclothes at all. He grabbed his blanket and attempted to put it in front of his genitals."Is that how you stand at parade rest, Detainee Manning?" a guard barked at him.

Manning dropped the blanket and for the next three minutes stood stark naked, feetshoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back, facing the entrance to his cell.

As the duty brig supervisor made his rounds, Manning snapped to attention. Thesupervisor stopped, looked at him and moved on. Several minutes later, Manningwas given back his prison uniform.

Manning was forced to relinquish his clothes for the next three nights. On March4th, 2011, news of Manning's forced nudity had been leaked to The New YorkTimes. When the piece reached the desk of Lt. Gen. Flynn, he felt blindsided. "Itwould be good to have the leadership have a heads-up on these things before theyare read!" he furiously e-mailed Quantico's commander irate. However, Flynndidn't ask that Manning be given back his clothes. None of the senior brass, in fact,

seemed concerned with Manning's treatment. From the MPs guarding the brig toofficials at the Pentagon, the attitude was, as one former general notes, one of"callous indifference."

This, in many minds, underscores the dangers of officially sanctioned enhancedinterrogation techniques. "In my view, the participation of the military in theseconfinement and interrogation procedures has had a very corrosive effect overtime," says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army brigadier general and psychiatristwho is a strong opponent of torture and other harsh interrogation practices. "I'mseeing these kinds of gratuitous and directionless, malicious acts and attitudes forno particular purpose. It shocks me."

The former chief prosecutor of the Guantnamo military commissions, retired AirForce Col. Morris Davis, agrees: "This whole 'gloves off, you're either with us orwith the terrorists' attitude that percolated down from the president to the privateson the front lines undermined the foundations of our military." The question todayis whether these practices, which Davis notes, "legitimized the unacceptable as thenew normal," created a mentality that filtered down to affect other militarydetention procedures. "It becomes much easier to conduct or condone abusive

treatment when you've spent years in an environment where everyone is either an'us' or a 'them,'" Davis says, "and where 'by any means necessary' is the baseline."


17/19

The U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mndez, would ultimately concludethat the U.S. government was guilty of "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment"toward Bradley Manning. A similar conclusion was drawn by some 250 prominentlawyers, law professors and legal scholars, including Obama's longtime mentor and

former adviser, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, who in April 2011 signeda letter published in The New York Review of Books denouncing Manning'streatment as "illegal and immoral," violating the Eighth Amendment's prohibitionof cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fifth Amendment's ban against pretrial

punishment. They also offered a stinging reproach to President Obama, who, theynoted, "was once a professor of constitutional law and entered the national stage asan eloquent, moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct ascommander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency."

On April 20th, 2011, after months of public pressure and negative press, Bradley

Manning was transferred to the Joint Regional Correctional Facility at FortLeavenworth, Kansas, where, after an extensive interview with the base's mental-health counselors, he was placed in medium custody. After nearly a year ofisolation, he would serve out the rest of his pretrial detention with inmates to talkto, housed in an 80-square-foot cell, with a large window providing natural light, a

bed and a toilet. He was given a mattress, sheets and a pillow. He could writeletters whenever he wanted and was given back all of his personal effects: books,clothing, letters, legal materials, pens, paper, toiletry itemsincluding soap, toilet

paper and a razorand his clothes. In December, during her testimony at hispretrial detention hearing, the commander of the Joint Regional Correctional

Facility, Lt. Col. Dawn Hilton, stated that since he arrived at Leavenworth,Manning has exhibited no significant mental-health or behavioral issues. Shedescribed him as a "typical" detainee.

Manning's pretrial detention hearing last December went on for nearly threeweeks. On January 8th, 2013, Col. Denise Lind, the military judge who is hearingManning's case at Fort Meade, ruled that a portion of his treatment at Quantico was"excessive" and did amount to illegal pretrial punishment. Lind gave Manning less

than four months off his eventual sentence, but she did not throw out the case ashis lawyers had requested. This ruling, though offering a small victory for thedefense, served to uphold the government's central argument that whateverManning may have endured at Quantico was justified in service to the far moreimportant goal of keeping him alive so he could stand trial.

On June 3rd of this year, Manning is scheduled to return to Col. Lind's courtroom,where, after repeated delays, he will finally begin court-martial proceedings. Now25 years old, he will by then have been in detention for more than 1,000 days

long enough, his attorney has argued, for the Empire State Building, which tookonly 410 days to construct, to be built, torn down and built again. Manning's


18/19

defense believes that the sheer amount of time he has been in detention violates thespeedy-trial rule, an argument that, so far, has gone nowhere. Nor has the defense'sinsistence that Manning's idealistic intentnot to mention the fact that he had held

back truly "sensitive documents," leaking only those he felt would do no harmbe

taken into consideration when considering his guilt. The even broader question ofwhether the documents he leaked should ever have been "classified" at all, aconversation Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, told me isvital for the country to have, will also not be discussed at trial.

Last November, Manning offered to plead guilty to a subset of the charges,effectively accepting responsibility for being the source of the WikiLeaksdocuments, though not conceding he aided the enemy. Judge Lind has impressedupon the government its burden to prove that Manning knew, conclusively, that hewas aiding Al Qaeda when he leaked the documents. Without this proof, which

many legal experts say may be tough to establish, the aiding-the-enemy charge willlikely fall apart.

The other charges against Manning, however, will likely stand. The government'scase is built on some 300,000 pages of forensic evidence: a gigantic trove that

prosecutors say details, down to the minute, Manning's activities. The chat logsbetween Manning and the entity believed to be Julian Assange in which the twodiscuss the procedures for uploading classified materials to WikiLeaksmay be

particularly damning in what many believe is a Justice Department campaign toindict Assange for espionage.

Later this year, the American government's long campaign against BradleyManning will conclude with a probable judgment that will send him to prison fordecades, if not for the rest of his life. Like all the hearings before it, his trial willtake place under a thick cloak of secrecy, monitored by military censors, with no

public access to court documents, and covered by a sparse and largely independentmedia. The larger news outlets, like much of the American public, have longmoved on from the WikiLeaks saga just as they lost interest in the war whoseabuses Manning exposed. On December 18th, 2011, the last 500 U.S. troops

quietly left Iraq, ending an almost nine-year military engagement.

But for Manning, the war, and its consequences, must live on. "We're humanandwe're killing ourselvesand no one seems to see that," Manning wrote Lamo inone of their online chats. "It bothers me." He then referenced author Elie Wiesel,whose belief that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference hit home."Apathy is far worse than the active participation," said Manning. "I prefer a

painful truth to any blissful fantasy."

This story is from the March 14th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.


19/19

Documents

The Trials of Bradley Manning